Sierra Club Research Articles

Freedom of Information: Secret Law versus Finality

The recent Supreme Court decision in Fish and Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club presents a conflict between the public’s right to know federal agency policies and a federal agency’s interest in protecting its deliberative materials from public review. The Sierra Club claimed that the Fish and Wildlife Service was violating the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to provide biological opinions – a required analysis of the potential impact of regulations on endangered species – by marking them draft and never producing a final opinion that would be publicly available. This article analyzes the decision and explains why the agency controls the decision as to what is publicly available. It is not that the agency interest in privacy is more important than the public’s right to know; the rule is that as long as the agency is deliberating, there is not final policy to make public.

Kicking Ash: Who (or What) is Winning the “War on Coal”?

US coal‐fired generating capacity has shed nearly 25% of its footprint between 2011 and 2018. Multiple factors—regulation, natural gas prices, renewable energy adoption, and environmental activism—have each been lauded by various stakeholders for this trend. To improve our understanding of this environmental technology transition, it is important to determine the extent to which each of these factors has accelerated coal unit retirements. We do so in this study through an accelerated failure time model that utilizes data on US coal‐fired generating units from 2008 through 2016. Our findings indicate that environmental regulation, reduced natural gas price volatility, increased utilization of renewable capacity, and the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign have all accelerated coal unit retirements. We do not, however, find evidence that natural gas price levels or the penetration of renewable capacity have accelerated coal unit retirements. Among the significant drivers, we estimate that the Beyond Coal campaign has had the greatest effect per unit, reducing expected operating life by an average of 24.4 months. However, among these factors, federal regulation affected the greatest number of coal units, and thus had the greatest aggregate impact on coal retirements. In post hoc analysis, we estimate that 40% of the generation that had been provided by retired coal‐fired units spilled over to surviving coal‐fired units. However, we estimate the 60% that was displaced from the coal fleet resulted in a 103.6 to 178.2 million metric ton net reduction in [Formula: see text] emissions each year.

Quantifying the challenge of reaching a 100% renewable energy power system for the United States

Quantifying the challenge of reaching a 100% renewable energy power system for the United States

Hungry, hungry hikers: Fitness, cooking, and gender in American hiking, 1890s–1920s

This article examines the recollections of American mountaineers and hikers written between the 1890s and 1920s to interrogate the evolving relationship hikers had with food consumption and physical fitness on the trail. It centres firstly on the trail accounts of Appalachian Mountain Club (1876) and Sierra Club (1892) members, before moving towards articles that appeared in outdoor recreation magazines such as Outing. Contrasting itself with existing scholarly work that has focused on the ecological impact of industrial food systems within environmental history, this article seeks to explore the unexamined social and cultural power of food on early American outdoorsmen and women. By highlighting the high-altitude discourses surrounding food and physical ability on the mountainside, the article demonstrates how potentially productive debates about food and modernity are complicated by contemporary ideas of gender and propriety. It also further demonstrates how early suspicions about nutritional science and the privileged, often-chauvinistic culture of American mountaineering limited the ability of these wealthy fitness communities to communicate a wider message about the nation’s shifting health fortunes.

Growing the Green Giant: Ecological Threats, Political Threats, and U.S. Membership in Sierra Club, 1892–Present

A growing body of research examines questions related to the emergence of environmental organizations and the growth of the environmental organizational field in the United States, but we need to know more about why particular environmental organizations grow or decline in terms of membership size over time. In this article, we draw on both qualitative and quantitative data to assess factors contributing to the growth of the Sierra Club, one of the United States’ oldest and largest environmental organizations. First, through an analytic narrative that synthesizes insights from secondary accounts of the history of the Sierra Club, we identify a variety of ecological and political threats that have led to growth in the Sierra Club from its founding in 1892 to the present day. Then, through time-series analyses of quantitative data, we show that two particular types of environmental and political threats—growth in carbon dioxide emissions and the presence of Republican Presidents—have led to growth in the Sierra Club from 1960 (when it began mass recruitment of members) to 2016. We contextualize these findings within the broader social scientific literature on neoliberalism and its consequences for environmental degradation and environmental mobilization. Overall, our findings provide support for threat-based models of mobilization and hold significant implications for research on environmental organizations.

Washington View: Toward more climate-friendly schools

The Biden administration is taking steps to address climate change, but, so far, little attention has been paid to the role of schools. Even within the education sector, as Maria Ferguson explains, conversations about education and climate change tend to focus how to teach students about it, rather than about how schools themselves might contribute to it. Groups such as UndauntedK12 and the Sierra Club are encouraging schools, and the policy makers who fund them, to look for opportunities to make school buildings and buses more climate friendly.

Violation of Land as Violation of Feminine Space: An Ecofeminist Reading of Mother Forest and Mayilamma

Agarwal, B. (1992). The gender and environment debate: Lessons from India. Feminist Studies, 18(1), 119-158. https:// doi.org/ 10.2307/ 3178217.
 Althuser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses
 (Notes toward an investigation). Lenin and philosophy, and other essays (B.Brewster, Trans.). Monthly Review Press, 1971.
 Basha, C. (2017). Tribal land alienation: A sociological analysis. International Journal of Advanced Educational Research, 2(3), 78–81. http:// www.educationjournal.org/archives/2017/vol2/issue3.
 Berman, T. (1993). Towards an integrative ecofeminist praxis. Canadian Women Studies, 13(3), 15–17. cws.journals.yorku.ca/ index.php/ cws/ article/ viewFile/10402/949.
 Béteille, A. (1986). The concept of tribe with special reference to India. European Journal of Sociology, 27(2), 296–318. https:// doi.org/ 10.1017/S000397560000463X
 Bhaskaran. (2004). Mother forest: The unfinished story of C K Janu (N Ravi Shankar, Trans). Kali for Women.
 Bijoy, C R. (2001). The Adivasis of India – A history of discrimination, conflict and resistance. Indigenous Affairs, Jan, 54-61. https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/295315229.
 Bose, N. K. (1971). Tribal life in India. National Book Trust.
 Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. Feminist Legal Theory, 1, 139–167. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429500480-5.
 Crenshaw, K. (2017). Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality, More than two decades later. Columbia Law School. www.law.columbia.edu/pt-br/news/2017/06/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality.
 Das, V. (2011). Orissa: Mining bauxite, maiming people. Economic & Political Weekly, 38(28). https://www.epw.in/journal/2001/28/commentary/orissa-mining-bauxite-maiming-people.html.
 Devika, J. (2010). Caregiver vs. citizen? Reflections on ecofeminism from Kerala state, India. Man in India, 89(4), 751–769. http:// www.academia.edu/
 Habermas, J. (1974). The public sphere: An encyclopedia article (1964). New German Critique, 3, 49–55. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367809195-3.
 Lewis, D. R. (1995). Native Americans and the environment: A survey of twentieth-century issues. American Indian Quarterly, 19(3), 423-450. https://doi.org/10.2307/1185599.
 Limpangog, C P. (2016) Matrix of domination. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 1–3. https:// doi.org/10.2307/3178217.
 Mahtab, M. (2018) When the Santhals rebelled. The Daily Star. Retrieved November 25, 2019, from https://www.thedailystar.net/in-focus/when-the-santhals-rebelled-1245196.
 Merchant, C. (1999). Ecofeminism and feminist theory. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, 100-105. Sierra Club Books.
 Merchant, C. (2014). Earthcare: Women and the environment. Routledge.
 Oberhauser, A. M., Fluri, J. L., Whitson, R. & Mollet, S. (2018). Feminist spaces: Gender and geography in a global context. Routledge.
 Ortner, S. (1974). Is female to male as nature is to culture? Woman, Culture, and Society (Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, Eds). Stanford University Press.
 Oskarsson, P. (2018). Adivasi land rights and dispossession. Landlock: Paralysing Dispute over Minerals on Adivasi Land in India, 14, 29–50. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv75d8rq.8.
 Pariyadath, J. (2018). Mayilamma: The life of a tribal eco-warrior. (Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Sreejith Varma, Trans). Orient BlackSwan.
 Pedersen, K. (1998). Environmentalism in interreligious perspective. Explorations in global ethics. (Sumner Twiss and Bruce Grelle, Eds.). Westview Press.
 Pulido, L. (1996). Environmentalism and economic justice: Two Chicano struggles in the Southwest. University of Arizona Press.
 Rangarajan, S, and Varma, S R. (2018). Introduction. Mayilamma: The life of a tribal eco-warrior (pp. xxi-xxxix). Orient BlackSwan.
 Ranjan, R. (2018). Birsa Munda and his struggle in colonial India. Talking Humanities. Retrieved on November 26, 2019, from https://talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2018/02/13/birsa-munda-and-his-struggle-in-colonial-india/.
 Shankar, R. (2004). Translator’s note. Mother Forest: The unfinished story of C K Janu (pp. ix-xii). Kali for Women.
 Showalter, E. (1981). Feminist criticism in the wilderness. Critical Inquiry, 8(2), 179-205. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343159.
 Varma, S. R., & Rangarajan, S. (2018). The politics of land, water and toxins: Reading the life-narratives of three women oikos-carers from Kerala. In D. A. Vakoch & S. Mickey (Eds.) Women and nature?: Beyond dualism in gender, body, and environment (pp. 167–184). Routledge.
 Vickery, A. (1993). Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history. The Historical Journal, 36(2), 383–414. www.jstor.org/stable/2639654.
 Warren, K. J. (2000). Ecofeminist philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
 Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press.
 Xaxa, V. (1999). Transformation of tribes in India: Terms of discourse. Economic and Political Weekly, 34(24), 1519–1524. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/4408077.

Standing in the environment: new fashion grassroots and old fashion court advocacy in the time of Trump

Justice Douglas called for judicial standing for the land, wildlife, and aesthetic vistas in the US environment independent of human or organizational actors (Sierra Club 1972, 741–751). In the 48 years since the Douglas dissent, the federal institutions have failed to expand any legal standing to elements of nature. Any environmental protection has been based on current property law theory of nature as the property of humans, to be managed or used. A nascent “Rights of Nature” movement proposes a new way of considering the environment based not on human values and concerns but viewing nature endowed with independent rights and legal standing. Advocates for this Earth Jurisprudence policy image have used local venues of direct democracy, town councils, and citizen ballot initiatives to protect local environmental treasures. The countermobilization of powerful interests at the state level has blocked the Rights of Nature movement. Existing court strategies under current jurisprudence continue to be necessary to offer some hope for protecting pro-environmental gains against negative actions in the executive. The paper proposes a model for predicting the possibilities of success by the Rights of Nature movement in local attempts to protect natural resources. Finally, the paper calls for Congressional and Constitutional actions to protect the right of nature to speak for herself.

"A Feminine Utopia": Mountain Climbing, Gender, and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

This article explores the creation of an ideology of female independence and freedom in American mountain climbers and mountain clubs from the 1870s through the early 1900s. It argues that the major mountain clubs of that era—the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Sierra Club, and the Mazamas—welcomed female members and consistently linked their physical and mental toughness, competence, and autonomy, implicitly or explicitly, to arguments for women's rights. This argument resonated precisely because mountaineering had already been closely linked with "manly" autonomy and independence, which in turn had long been the basis for citizenship claims. Thus, an ideology of female independence and freedom supported and promoted by American mountain clubs and their members helped lay the cultural foundations needed to make women's suffrage seem reasonable to the American public.

Someday a Big Plague Will Come: Laurie Garrett’sThe Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance

Someday a Big Plague Will Come: Laurie Garrett’sThe Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance

A Conversation

A Conversation

Classical administrative law in the era of presidential administration

Direito administrativo clássico na era da administração presidencialABSTRACTFarber and O’Connell described ways in which contemporary practice departs from classical administrative law and they have done a great service by so carefully identifying the gaps between both. Administrative practice today is out of step with classical doctrine, but Farber and O’Connell’s argument exaggerates the divergence in one important aspect. Classical administrative law requires regulatory decisions to be taken by the agencies responsible for the status of making them, on the basis of statutory procedures and criteria however, it should be remembered that the administrative law itself is divided. In short, the recommendation is not to give up all the basic premises of classical administrative law, it’s about looking at the differences and understand how much of it should be maintained.RESUMOFarber e O’Connell descreveram maneiras pelas quais a prática contemporânea se afasta do direito administrativo clássico e fizeram um grande serviço ao identificar tão cuidadosamente as lacunas entre os dois. A prática administrativa nos dias atuais está fora de sintonia com a doutrina clássica, porém o argumento de Farber e O’Connell exagera na divergência em um aspecto importante. O direito administrativo clássico exige que as decisões regulatórias sejam tomadas pelas agências encarregadas por fazê-las, com base em procedimentos e critérios legais, porém se deve lembrar de que o direito administrativo em si é dividido. Em suma, a recomendação não é desistir de todas as premissas básicas do direito administrativo clássico, e sim analisar as divergências e entender o quanto dele deve ser mantido.

Journalism as an Advocacy Tool: Negotiating Boundaries of Professionalism in the 20th-Century American Environmental Movement

Environmental nongovernmental organizations faced unprecedented opportunities after public interest in environmental issues exploded in the 1960s. Drawing on the official archives of the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and the National Audubon Society, this study demonstrates how these organizations redeveloped their publications to take advantage of newfound public interest and political opportunities in the 1960s through the 1980s. The organizations adopted professional journalistic norms and practices in their publications to court mass appeal and gain political legitimacy, but their journalistic endeavors were hampered by internal disagreements over the use of journalism as an advocacy tool.

Naming Mount Barcroft.

Background: The University of California White Mountain Research Center is located on Mount Barcroft, a 13,040-ft (3975-m) peak on the California White Mountain range. This report describes how the peak got its name honoring Sir Joseph Barcroft of Great Britain. Materials and Methods: Several publicly available webpages were the sources for this study. Results: On October 16, 1951, the United States Board on Geographic Names approved "Mount Barcroft" as the name for a peak on the California White Mountain range enabling the building of a facility dedicated to high-altitude research. The process of naming, however, was far from smooth. Objections came from the members of the Sierra Club, editors of a local newspaper, and a few citizens of California delaying the approval process. At least six other names had been proposed, three of which were from a Native American Indian language. Those who opposed the name "Mount Barcroft" argued that Barcroft never visited the United States, let alone the White Mountain region, and there was a paucity of Native American Indian names for geographic features in the United States. Conclusions: Despite oppositions and controversies, however, a much-deserved scientist was duly honored by an agency of the United States federal government.

Kicking Ash: Who (or What) Is Winning the 'War on Coal'?

US coal-fired generating capacity has shed nearly 25% of its footprint between 2011 and 2018. Multiple factors—regulation, natural gas prices, renewable energy adoption, and environmental activism—have each been lauded by various stakeholders for this trend. To improve our understanding of this environmental technology transition, it is important to determine the extent to which each of these factors has accelerated coal unit retirements. We do so in this study through an accelerated failure time model that utilizes data on US coal-fired generating units from 2008 through 2016. Our findings indicate that environmental regulation, reduced volatility in natural gas prices, increased utilization of renewable capacity, and the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign have all accelerated coal unit retirements. We do not, however, find evidence that natural gas price levels or the penetration of wind and solar capacity have accelerated coal unit retirements. Among the significant drivers, we estimate that the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has had the greatest effect per unit, reducing expected operating life by an average of 24.4 months. However, among these factors, federal regulation has effected the greatest number of coal units, and thus had the greatest aggregate impact on coal retirements. In post hoc analysis, we estimate that 40% of the generation that had been provided by retired coal-fired units spilled over to surviving coal-fired units. However, the 60% that was displaced from the coal fleet resulted in a 103.6 to 178.2 million metric ton reduction in CO2 emissions each year.

Commentary: 86th Texas State Legislature: Summaries of Water-related Legislative Action

Editor-in-Chief’s Note: September 1 of every odd-numbered year is the date when new legislation from the most recent session of the Texas Legislature typically goes into effect. With this in mind, the Texas Water Journal invited five organizations that work closely with the Texas Legislature to provide their take on the changes to Texas water policy and law that were made during the 2019 session. The opinions expressed in these summaries are the opinions of the individual organizations and not the opinions of the Texas Water Journal or the Texas Water Resources Institute.Organizations:• Sierra Club, Lone Star Chapter and Save Our Springs Alliance• Texas Water Conservation Association• Texas Alliance of Groundwater Districts• Texas Rural Water Association• Texas Water Infrastructure Network Citation: Kramer K, Mullins C, Robbins D, Steinbach SA, Martinsson L, Hightower T, Fowler PL. 2019. Commentary: 86th Texas State Legislature: Summaries of Water-related Legislative Action. Texas Water Journal. 10(1):75-100. Available from: https://doi.org/10.21423/twj.v10i1.7100.

The Trees Are Still Standing: The Backstory of Sierra Club v. Morton

The Trees Are Still Standing: The Backstory of <i>Sierra Club v. Morton</i>

Kirby V. Scherer Jr.

Kirby V. Scherer Jr., 82, died on Feb. 15, 2018, in Hockessin, Delaware. “Kirby was a professor and research chemist. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California and worked at the DuPont Experimental Station. He was a member of the Harvard Alumni Association, USC Faculty Association, American Chemical Society, and Sierra Club. He was an ACS member for 43 years and an active member of the fluorine division. Chemists will remember his research contributions, such as Scherer’s radical, which is still widely used and studied today. He was a devoted member of ACS, and it isn’t a coincidence that one of his sons bears the initials ACS.”—Andrew C. Scherer, son Most recent title: Research chemist, DuPont Education: BS, chemistry, 1958, and PhD, chemistry, 1963, Harvard University Survivors: Daughters, Annye Bone and Nancy Connolly; sons, Andrew and Peter; stepchildren, Danica Hymen, David Hoos, Jennifer

Introduction

Introduction MELVIN I. UROFSKY It is always our aim to provide our readers with a rich diversity of materials on the history of our nation's highest court, but I think this issue is one of the most diverse in my quarter-century as editor of the Journal. We have articles on legal strategy, the con­ stitutional validation of the Union victory in the Civil War, the maneuverings that took a little-known lawyer from the heartland to the Supreme Court, the end of one of the most important eras in the Court's history, and how environmental concerns made their way into the volumes of U.S. Reports. John Marshall, the great Chief Justice, is always ranked as one of the three most important persons to have sat on the high court, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis Dembitz Brandeis. Scholars, myself included, consider the decisions handed down by Marshall in his thirty-four years on the bench to be the building blocks of our constitutional structure. Yet if one looks closely, the really important decisions took place in his first two decades, and of the opinions in his last years, the Cherokee cases stand almost alone. Professor William Da­ venport Mercer of the University of Ten­ nessee suggests that if we look closely at the last years of the Marshall Court, we will see that circumstances—both of a personal and political nature—had changed dramatically from the heyday of McCulloch and Gibbons. Two years ago the Society sponsored a lecture series on “Presidents and Their Cabinets,” and due to a variety of circum­ stances, we were unable to print all of the lectures in the same issue. We now have the last of those lectures, the one on Salmon P. Chase, who served as Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, and then became Chief Justice to succeed Roger Taney. Professor Cynthia L. Nieoletti of the University of Virginia Law School reminds us that Chase's famous comment, that “the Con­ stitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of in­ destructible states,” which is now accepted as a foundational constitutional tenet, was not always so, especially in the years before Texas v. White (1869). In the history of the First Amendment's Speech Clause, most historians see the in­ famous case of Dennis v. United States (1951) as an unfortunate stumble by the Court on the road from Abrams v. United States (1919) to Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). In fact, the Court reversed itself in just six years in the Yates case. Why and 134 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY how this volte-face came about has been at­ tributed to a number of causes—changes in the political environment and personnel changes on the bench being the two most common reasons given. Hayden Thorne, a doctoral student at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, suggests another reason: a significant shift in legal strategy, which appealed to the sitting judges in both the trial and appellate courts far more than the effort of the Dennis attorneys to make it a political trial. For environmentalists, no member of the Supreme Court is held in higher esteem than William O. Douglas, who made pro­ tecting our natural resources his chief ex­ trajudicial activity. Many legal scholars mocked him when in dissent he suggested that trees and rivers ought to have legal standing so that they could challenge the depredations visited upon them by devel­ opers. Although trees may not yet have standing, the courts have proven more friendly to groups like the Sierra Club who, in a way, speak for the trees. The Hon. M. Margaret McKeown, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, takes a fresh look at the case that included the Douglas dissent, Sierra Club v. Morton (1972), and has come up with new and interesting findings. A number of years ago I had the priv­ ilege of interviewing Justice Harry A. Blackmun, and he rather self-deprecatingly referred to himself as “old number three,” meaning that he had been Richard Nixon's third choice to replace Abe Fortas, after the Senate turned down his first two...

The Trees Are Still Standing: The Backstory of Sierra Club v. Morton

The Trees Are Still Standing: The Backstory of Sierra Club v. Morton